A cavernous museum on hallowed ground is finally nearing completion, far below the earth where the twin towers once stood.

Amid the construction machinery and the dust, powerful artifacts of death and destruction have assumed their final resting places inside the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

The northern Italian town where Antonio Stradivari and other master violin-makers worked will open a new museum celebrating the instrument.

Cremona will inaugurate the Museum of the Violin on Sept. 14. In a recreated violin-maker's shop, visitors can watch how the instruments are hand crafted. They can admire creations of Stradivari and other famous Cremona violin-makers, the Amati and the Guarneri families, with the instruments in protective showcases, and hear violins being played.

A Texas museum has acquired a full-length painting by John Singer Sargent of Edwin Booth, the renowned 19th-century actor and brother of President Abraham Lincoln's assassin.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth announced the acquisition Friday. The portrait from 1890 was commissioned by members of The Players — a private club for actors founded by Booth and his friends. It remained there until 2002, when it was sold to a private collector. The painting will now go on view Friday in the Amon Carter's main gallery, the first time it will be on extended public display.

A South Korean cinema chain under pressure from conservatives on Saturday withdrew a controversial documentary film challenging government findings that a warship sunk in 2010 was torpedoed by the North.

It was the first time in South Korea that the screening of a film has been cancelled under political pressure, Yonhap news agency said.

Crematorium ovens, gas canisters and images of a gate emblazoned "Arbeit Macht Frei" instantly evoke the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in the West but many Chinese remain ignorant of the Holocaust, which for them is overshadowed by Japanese atrocities before and during World War II.

The first ever exhibition in China devoted to Nazi crimes against humanity has sought to draw more attention to it, with some success: in less than two months, more than 70,000 people visited "Auschwitz: death camp" in Beijing.

A prisoner's cap stolen from the museum at a former Nazi German death camp in Poland and put up for sale on eBay has been returned, a spokeswoman for the institution said Wednesday.

The blue and white striped cap was stolen from the museum at Majdanek more than 20 years ago and only turned up on eBay in the United States this year.

As Iraq rebuilds after decades of brutality, one Baghdad resident is bent on reviving an ancient folk tale that, like much of the country's history, risks being lost in time.

"Baghdad Night" is a 10-minute 3D animated film made against all odds by an Iraqi team led by film-maker Furat al-Jamil.

The organizers of the Miss World beauty pageant in Indonesia insisted Wednesday the show would go on, as Islamic hardline protests began to spread across the country days before the contest starts.

Hardliners have started mobilizing to protest at the decision to host the contest in Muslim-majority Indonesia, while Islamic clerics and even a government minister have voiced criticism.

Archaeologists drawing on a wide range of tools said on Wednesday they had pinpointed the crucial time in world history when Egypt emerged as a distinct state.

Experts have wrangled for decades as to when turbulent upper and lower Egypt were brought together under a stable, single ruler for the first time.

More than 200 languages have vanished in India over the last 50 years, a new study says, blaming urban migration and fear among nomadic tribes of speaking their traditional tongues.

The extensive study, conducted throughout the country over four years and released this week, has found 230 languages have "elapsed" while another 870 have survived the test of time in richly diverse but rapidly modernizing India, home to a vast number of indigenous or tribal peoples.